Dell 2405FPW 24" TFT

Picture Quality

Well the vital question for those wanting a top screen - what is the picture like? I can answer that right now with a very confident: "Excellent".

This monitor is easily the sharpest I\'ve ever used. In the light and the dark the screen is awesome. Brightness is top notch and even the blacks are very good. LCD\'s are notorious for "greying" out blacks but even though this display has a very bright backlight I found that darks are very good. I did find that I had to leave the backlight to 50% (default) as any brighter tended to lighten up those excellent blacks.

Xbox 360 shots showing light and dark:

Normal PC shot:

Overall the picture is awesome - most likely the best picture I've seen - aside from the £3000 plasma 1080p screen I saw demo'd.Feature Spotlight: Picture in Picture (PiP)I felt that I had to highlight this excellent feature of the Dell 2405FPW. The monitor allows Picture in Picture (PiP for short).

PiP allows you to view the picture from two different sources at the same time. The choices you have are either D-Sub (VGA) or DVI-D with either S-Video, Composite or Component being the other input.

At first I thought I would never use the feature, but I have come to use this a lot for both building another PC and for the XBox 360.

Thie brings me neatly onto the inputs:

Inputs

The 2405 has the following inputs:

DVI-D D-SUB (VGA) Component Composite S-Video

These are all neatly stacked up on the underside of the monitor and are easy to plug into as you can turn the monitor round (see prevous page).

The soundbar power also plugs straight into the monitor, and above displayed is also the 4in1 card reader that some people may find very handy.

Gaming

It may be worth noting that a screen this size takes a fair bit of graphical power to output at its native res. If you\'ll refer to the Spec page where I have put the rig specs, you\'ll see that the test rig is pretty high spec.

Anything below an Nvidia 7800GTX 512mb will struggle at this res...and in fact games like F.E.A.R. meant that I had to OC the card to 624/1830 before I could output at 1920 x 1200.

I have not noticed any problems with tearing or any other visual issues associated with TFT's and gaming - the 16ms response time on this monitor is most likely true in this case as I would have noticed (I am very picky).

Gaming at this high res is very strange, but satisfying, and you do get to see more of the game. This is very helpful in games like CS:S and Quake 4 as you can see around you more. Gamers: do not be afraid to buy this it is certainly up to the job of displaying the fast and frantic frames of first person shooter's.

Update 19/01/2007

Having owned this monitor for a year or more I can safely say that gaming on the Dell 2405 is a quality experience and I am yet to find a rival that keeps up with it. The screen has a 16ms response time but if you use vSynch this is not noticible in any way.

Gaming on the Xbox 360 is a great experience and games like Gears of War look simply spell-bounding on the display.

Also note that it's worth getting a VGA lead if you want to use the Dell 2405FPW with the 360 as the output looks a bit brighter and clearer than with composite, though this is not really the fault of the monitor as I have tested this on other monitors and find the same thing.

HD DVD and Blu-Ray playback is stunning and scaling on the monitor is excellent producing a crystal clear picture.

Most Recent Comments

Run OCCT or a small fft prime95 torture test for 12 hours... Then run a large fft torture test. Do a few 32mb super pi's and you should be good to go if you can do all of the afformentioned tests w/o errors.

If you pass all of those then bump up your volts and your OC! Obviously make sure to keep your temps within optimal operating zones.

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